- native americans characters and otherness -

"Livin’ with Comanches ain’t being alive." (John Wayne - The searchers)

"In order to become Comanches you first have to die." (Herbert Achternbusch - Der Comantsche) 

In early Hollywood Westerns, most of the background Indians were real Navajo people. There was a colony of Navajo Indians living traditionally in a camp in Malibu who were on studio pay. When Indians of any tribe were needed for a western, a bus would pull up and load up for their background work. That is why in all those films, most of the time the language you hear spoken is "Dine," one of the Athapascan dialects of the Navajo and Apache people. The major speaking roles for American Indians would still go to non-Native actors like Burt Lancaster and Charles Bronson. Explaining why Will Sampson from One Flew Over Cuckoo's was overlooked for an Academy Award nomination, one director was quoted as saying, "Why should an Indian receive an award for playing an Indian?"

- indians in spaghetti westerns -

The first Italian Western movie was La Vampira Indiana (1913) – a combination of Western and vamp film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother Bice Walerian in the title role as Indian princess fatale. The only fairly successful Spaghetti Western with an Indian main character (played by Burt Reynolds) is Sergio Corbucci's Navajo Joe, where the Indian village is wiped out by bandits during the first minutes, and the avenger hero spends the rest of the film dealing mostly with Anglos and Mexicans until the final showdown in an Indian burial ground.


- indians in german westerns -

Eastern-European-produced Westerns were popular in Communist Eastern European countries, and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin. "Red Western" or "Ostern" films usually portrayed the American Indians sympathetically, as oppressed people fighting for their rights. They frequently featured Gypsies or Turkish people in the role of the Indians, due to the shortage of authentic Indians in Eastern Europe. Yugoslavian born actor Gojko Mitić portrayed righteous, kind hearted and charming Indian chiefs.

- critical approach -

In film Der Comantsche by Herbert Achternbusch, (1980) Comanche is in coma. A famous writer is the last patient in a clinic about to close down. His dreams are transmitted to the television tube - instant literary adaptations for the livingroom cyclops! Achternbusch plays ‘a Comanche Indian’ and projects all kinds of weird, zany stories onto the screen. The howler is when he and his partner tie chickens to their scalps and go on a hunt in a Wiener Wald - restaurant, that is.”

Achternbusch's idiosyncratic performances of Native Americans criticize rather than endorse the contemporary fascination with all things Indian, they specifically link the German's eagerness to identify with the victim with a displacement of their historical responsibility for the Holocaust and its legacy.

Both traditional and critical representation of otherness through native american characters could be sublimed with etymology of one word: Comanche. Word comes probably from Spanish comanche, a corruption of Shoshonean language expression, kimánci meaning "enemy, foreigner." Other source says that the name Comanche is derived from a Ute word meaning "anyone who wants to fight me all the time". But the Comanche people call themselves Numunuh ("The People").